Category: manufacturing

The manufacturing industry today would not be the same without the extraordinary men and women who shaped it decades ago. Watch this space to learn about these visionary people and how they revolutionized this industry in their own way.

Here’s our very own version of #throwbackthursday, with inventor, chemist, and entrepreneur, James Watt.

Time flies. We are already in Q2. Let’s take a look back at some of our blog posts that stood out in terms of engagement and also refresh your memory to make sure you didn’t miss an important post. Due to a huge shift in the manufacturing industry to digitize operations, it is no surprise that the most popular posts were often related to new technological developments.

Imagine you are the manager of a leading manufacturing company. One of your responsibilities involves managing operations at an automotive component plant.You are home one blustery night when your cell phone buzzes. You received an instant text alert from the factory about machines breaking down.

George Charles Devol, often referred to as the father of robotics, invented the Unimate in 1954. This first industrial robot soon went online in a General Motors automobile factory in New Jersey. Devol and engineer Joseph Engelberger’s Unimate performed spot welding and extracted die castings.

“One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions,” said Grace Murray Hopper, widely recognized as a true pioneer of computing. This could be faulted by the overly literal as an idea that may not always hold true. But for the workforce in manufacturing, it is certainly of paramount importance.

Manufacturing has always been a complex world. It is only getting more complex with so much data being generated everyday, and this is certainly going to increase significantly in the future. At the center of it, surviving means being able to leverage all this data and adapting your workforce to data-driven manufacturing. Two factors are converging that make big data analytics a perfect fit for manufacturing. First are growing market pressures, including global competition, regulations, thin margins, and accelerated design cycles, among others. In order to respond, manufacturers have to be able to make data-driven decisions quickly. The second factor is the growth of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), referring to how everything is going digital and being networked. As a result, more data is being generated than ever before by equipment, automation, systems, and even the products themselves. This data just needs to be harnessed to support the decision-making process.